What Alice Knew

by T. A. Cotterell

  A spasm of fear. I stretched out an arm for the digital clock and knocked the Selected Poems of Philip Larkin on to the floor. It landed face down. Phil would have expected no more. Seven twenty-seven: too early for friendly visitors. My shoulders felt stiff.

  I’d half-woken when Ed left at five thirty. He had work to do before he headed to London with Pete for that woman’s memorial service. I hadn’t got back to sleep, drifting in and out of consciousness, dark shadows in my peripheral vision. A horn honked somewhere beyond the open window and a car changed down as it ground up the hill. I propped myself up on an elbow.

  ‘Two men?’

  ‘In jackets.’

  ‘Jackets?’

  ‘And ties.’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘They want to talk to you and Daddy.’

  ‘OK, tell them I’ll be down in two minutes. Take them into the kitchen.’

  Arthur nodded and disappeared. I pulled on a check shirt with a frayed collar, paint-spattered jeans and a pair of cherry Converse. No socks. I didn’t want anyone to think this wasn’t a typical day in the life of the stay-at-home painter. I checked the mirror: my skin looked dry, my hair a mess. It would take more than the Manhattan skyline of lotions and potions on the chest of drawers to make myself look attractive. I lined up my opening, straightened my story. They would have to take me as I was.

  They always say plain-clothes policemen are still obviously policemen and I can now confirm that to be true. The taller had a beard flecked with grey, owl-rimmed glasses, a soft, feminine mouth that reminded me of the mother of a boyfriend I’d once had and a grape-coloured birthmark on his neck. He looked tired, worn down by the gap between what people did and what they said they’d done. He wore a plain suit and his tie was polyester, maroon with diagonal gold stripes. It conjured memories of sporty drinks parties at Cambridge, when all those young blades the world owed a living to strutted around in light-blue blazers with red lion logos, maroon and gold ties and too-short-at-the-ankle-too-tight-at-the-thigh grey slacks they’d been given for some sports tour or other.

  ‘Mrs Edward Sheahan?’

  ‘Yes?’

  The muscles around my mouth felt as if they were flickering like strobes. I prayed nothing was visible externally. These men were trained.

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Pullen. This is Detective Constable James. I apologize for getting you up so early, but may we have a word?’

  ‘What is it? What’s happened? Is someone hurt?’

  I nodded at DC James but he didn’t acknowledge me. He was younger, smaller, a thuggish man with a centre parting and a boxer’s neck, shifting uncomfortably in his suit. His top button was undone and his tie loose. DI Pullen glanced at Arthur and raised an eyebrow. He was sprawled across the sofa reading a book, a cartoon of literary concentration, the son any mum would wish for. I wasn’t fooled.

  ‘Go and get dressed, darling, you’ve got to go in half an hour. And have a shower. And wash your hair. It looks like candyfloss.’

  Arthur kept ‘reading’.

  ‘Please.’

  He looked up.

  ‘Now.’

  Arthur dragged himself off the sofa as if he was made of lead and disappeared upstairs. DI Pullen smiled and his whole demeanour changed. I made a mental note not to be deceived.

  When Arthur had gone I offered them coffee. They both declined. Pullen indicated the armchair. I could feel DC James looking me up and down as I crossed the kitchen. Men are so transparent. They stare at your cleavage or legs or ass and when you catch their eye they pretend they’ve got some amazing interest in a British Gas billboard behind you, or a shop selling lightbulbs across the road. I sat down and crossed my legs. Pullen pushed his owlish glasses back on to the bridge of his nose and, in a voice that implied ‘at last’, said,

  ‘Is your husband at home?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Look, can you tell me what this is all about?’

  Anyone who was innocent would focus on the police’s presumption – just bowling in and asking intrusive questions without explaining why they were there. DC James was studying the kitchen as if trying to memorize everything for a TV quiz with prizes.

  ‘We’ll get to that in a minute. Before, could you please just tell me where he is?’

  ‘He’s at work.’

  Pullen glanced at his watch.

  ‘He’s going to a memorial service later, so he went in early to finish off some work.’

  Pullen nodded at James, who promptly disappeared into the hall.

  ‘A memorial service?’

  ‘In London.’

  ‘Can I ask whose?’

  ‘A lady called Araminta Lyall.’ I felt a metallic taste in my mouth. ‘You know …’

  ‘We know Araminta Lyall. Will he have left the hospital yet?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s going with a colleague.’ I was about to add ‘who knew her very well’ but stopped myself. Ed insisted we should only ever give the minimum information. ‘I’m not sure what time the service is.’ A nice touch, not too interested.

  ‘OK, thank you. Now, the reason we are here is about your husband and Araminta Lyall.’

  My face automatically creased into a frown. I even surprised myself. Nature taking over. It is one thing to ‘know’ the truth, it is another to be formally confronted by it. While it had been mine and Ed’s ‘secret’ that woman’s death had almost seemed hypothetical. Suddenly the real world was encroaching.

  ‘Sorry?’ I managed.

  ‘Mrs Sheahan, how well did your husband know Ms Lyall?’

  I summoned maximum indignation.

  ‘Hold on a sec. Can we go back a step? What do you mean, how well did my husband know Araminta Lyall? He didn’t know her at all.’

  ‘Mrs Sheahan, we are investigating the murder of Araminta Lyall. We have reason to believe your husband may have been involved with Ms Lyall.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’

  I shook my head vigorously, hoping I didn’t sound like my mother at her most haughty and trying not to give the impression I was some sort of little wifey who had no idea what her dirty stop-out of a husband got up to at night.

  ‘And yet he is at her memorial service?’

  Pullen had seen every type of bluster. It was a brisk reminder he was better at interviews than I was. I should have done Footlights when I had the chance. All I could hope was that this was a fishing expedition.

  ‘As far as I know he met her once, at a party given by his colleague Peter Spurling the week before she died.’

  ‘He only met her once, at a party, and yet he’s gone to her memorial service?’ Pullen gave a dry laugh. ‘He must go to quite a few.’

  I dipped my head to acknowledge his thrust but knew I had to press on.

  ‘Somehow, because my husband doesn’t normally drink, he got completely plastered at the party and ended up back at her flat with a whole lot of others. That’s why he’s gone today. That and to offer support to Pete, who’s his protégé and who has lost a friend.’

  ‘If your husband doesn’t drink, why did he get … plastered?’

  ‘Because he was exhausted. He’d just finished a forty-hour shift.’

  Pullen took a narrow notepad and plastic biro from his breast pocket and jotted a few words on it. He looked back at me. I felt prickly heat at the back of my neck.

  ‘He said he had one to try to get going because he was so tired. He didn’t want to go to the party but he had to because it was Pete and he was celebrating passing his finals. And because he never drinks, one made him light-headed, and because there was no one else from the hospital there and Pete kept holding him up as the great obstetrician and telling everyone how fantastic he was, he was flattered, anyone would have been, and so he had another. He said every time he tried to leave, Pete introduced him to more people. So he got his second wind.’

  ‘Has he had a problem with alcohol historically?’


  ‘No. He hardly ever drinks, never has, mainly because he works so hard.’

  ‘And when he does drink – on the rare occasions – does he … is he …?’

  ‘Inspector, I’ve been married to him for fifteen years and I can categorically say I have never seen him tipsy, let alone drunk. And there has never been any change of character if that’s what you mean. My guess is he thought he was twenty years younger and twenty degrees cooler than he is. You know how men are.’

  I left the words hanging in the air. Pullen drummed his fingers on the island. When he was thinking he rolled his tongue around his mouth.

  ‘Didn’t you try to stop him?’

  ‘I wasn’t there. I was painting a portrait in Suffolk.’

  ‘On a Saturday night?’

  ‘It overran. Was supposed to finish on Friday but went through to Saturday teatime, which meant I was never going to be back in time for the party.’

  ‘Pink ticket?’

  ‘He was there on his own, if that’s what you mean.’

  Pullen looked sharply at me. James appeared in the doorway.

  ‘On their way, sir.’

  James disappeared back into the hall.

  ‘And presumably he became involved with Ms Lyall or he wouldn’t have gone back to her flat?’

  ‘Or he may have been chatting to one of the others who went. He didn’t go into a huge amount of detail. He did say he tried to get the taxi that had taken them to Montpelier to bring him home when it dropped everyone at her place, but the driver didn’t speak English and drove off while my husband was saying goodbye to everyone.’

  ‘So he went into her flat?’

  ‘To call a cab.’

  ‘Mobile?’

  ‘He’d left it at work.’

  ‘And he stayed?’

  ‘I think he was pretty embarrassed to be there.’

  ‘At Ms Lyall’s?’

  ‘Getting drunk at a much younger colleague’s party. Going back to a flat with people fifteen years younger than he was who he’d never met before. Crashing out. Waking up in some younger woman’s flat in an armchair. Which bit of that is how a senior obstetrician should behave?’

  ‘Everyone has to let their hair down.’

  ‘Probably best not to do it in front of your juniors.’

  Pullen rolled his tongue.

  ‘I thought you said there was no one else from St Anthony’s at the party?’

  He stared at me, glassy-eyed. DI Pullen unnerved me. Sentences linked. Patterns loomed where before there were none. I felt a web being weaved and I was suddenly conscious he probably knew a lot more than he let on. On my side, everything definitely needed to hang together. The children’s whole lives were at stake. I leant back in my chair and pulled an ankle on to a knee.

  ‘Just the host.’

  ‘Ah, of course, the host. Mr Spurling.’

  ‘A hundred to one against he would have drunk at all if there had been any more of his juniors there.’

  Pullen paused, as if to contemplate his own tiny mistake. I tried not to stare at his birthmark.

  ‘So, going back – or forward – do you know what happened when he got to Ms Lyall’s? Did they talk?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. By the sound of it he crashed out pretty much straight away.’

  ‘And he didn’t talk about her at all.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Even when she died and it was in all the papers?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course then he did. And I asked lots of questions. But the problem was that he didn’t have much to say. He could remember talking to her briefly at the party, right at the end, which was why he’d gone back to Stokes Croft, but he couldn’t remember much about what she was like, or what they talked about, and his memory of the time at her flat was minuscule.’

  ‘So he said.’

  ‘I have no reason not to believe him. My husband is scrupulously honest. It’s one of the reasons I married him.’

  ‘What about on the Sunday morning?’

  ‘Said he got up and left. I don’t think they shared coffee and croissants, if that’s what you mean, or exchanged life stories, but maybe they did. I guess you’d have to ask him.’

  ‘We will be asking him, but I’m asking you.’ Pullen’s face was granite.

  ‘Well, I can only assume he was embarrassed and wanted out ASAP.’

  ‘But you didn’t ask?’

  ‘I didn’t ask.’

  ‘Even after she died?’

  ‘After she died I asked what she was like, not how they spent their time together. He’d already said he barely knew her.’

  ‘And what did he say she was like?’

  ‘He didn’t say much. Said she was obviously intelligent, and that an art dealer at the party told him she was an amazing artist. That was about all he remembered.’

  ‘Would you say your husband is attracted to “amazing” artists?’

  ‘He was attracted to me, not my art, if that’s what you mean. I’d barely started in those days.’

  Pullen flicked back a page on his pad to read a note he had taken earlier. I prayed I hadn’t contradicted myself.

  ‘And from the Sunday morning when he left her flat to the Wednesday she died he had no further contact with Araminta Lyall?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘As far as you know.’

  ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘So he could have done?’

  ‘Of course he could have done. But I don’t see why he would’ve.’

  ‘Unless he didn’t just “crash out”? Unless something happened that meant he had to go back?’

  I shot him a quizzical look. It was essential to maintain the façade of bewilderment. If you don’t act like a victim they think you are a perpetrator.

  ‘Detective, could you explain why you think Ed might have been involved in her death?’

  ‘Have you talked to many people about how your husband spent the night at Araminta Lyall’s flat just a few days before she was killed?’

  I sighed. It said: this is very inconvenient. I have children to get to school and although I may not look like I’m dressed for work, I have work to do. Pullen took no notice. We had discussed the case in a general way at the Noones’, but Ed hadn’t opened up about his night at her flat.

  ‘No.’

  Pullen put his pen in his mouth and twirled it. His eyes were heavy-lidded, sleepy but as dangerous as a snake.

  ‘You are a very discreet pair.’

  I gave a courtroom smile but didn’t answer.

  ‘Almost unique, I’d say.’ He tapped his pen against his chin.

  ‘Thank you.’ I could do laconic too.

  ‘Perhaps you haven’t seen anyone since the police announced they were treating it as murder?’

  ‘We get about.’

  ‘But no one’s thought to mention the reason Bristol is on the front pages?’

  ‘I appreciate it’s different in your line of work, Detective, but I was brought up not to trample over other people’s misfortune.’

  I sounded like my mother, which was half what I intended. No one was better at closing a conversation through sheer breeding. She could stop clocks with a glance. Pullen nodded contemplatively.

  ‘Has your husband ever had affairs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not as far as you are aware?’

  ‘Are you telling me that he has?’

  ‘I’m not sure I can tell you anything, Mrs Sheahan.’

  The words came out in his loping drawl but contained slow poison. I decided to fish. It must be better that he was doing the talking.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning you are very sure of yourself, and your husband.’

  ‘Are you married, Inspector?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Long time?

  ‘Twenty-six years.’

  ‘You know your wife?’

  Pullen frowned. The pen came out of his mouth and went back in. I lean
t back in my chair. I had nailed it.

  ‘Then perhaps you can tell me why Araminta Lyall came round here and left your husband a bouquet of flowers on the Monday before she died.’

  Silence.

  I tried to show no emotion but my mind was boiling like a swollen river. The obvious question, but also the road to dusty death, was: ‘How the hell do you know that?’ I should have been upfront about the flowers, but it was so unlikely they would have found out about them. Or was it? They must have been through her credit card records. But how would they know she had brought them here? It wasn’t the time to worry about the how, simply the explanation. This wasn’t Watergate. No one would be hanged for the cover-up.

  ‘That, oh those, yes, that was because Ed helped to sort out her plumbing or something.’

  Pullen flicked back in his notebook, scanning the pages.

  ‘Even though he …’ He read his notes out verbatim. ‘ “Said he got up and left. I don’t think they shared coffee and croissants, if that’s what you mean, or exchanged life stories, but maybe they did.” Yet he still had time to “sort out her plumbing or something”?’

  I held his eye when he looked up. It was essential I showed no weakness.

  ‘I don’t think it was very much, just turning a tap or a switch.’

  ‘Enough to make her bring round flowers?’

  ‘Eye of the beholder?’

  ‘But which you didn’t think it was worth mentioning when I asked you whether he had any further contact with Ms Lyall?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought you meant “contact” as in seeing her, or speaking to her. The flowers were delivered while he was at work and I was picking up the children from school.’

  Pullen turned away from the island and walked over to the window. He had the lithe movement of a former athlete. There was silence while he looked at the garden. If he was waiting for me to add anything he was going to wait a long time. Everyone knows you let silence build. Don’t leap in. He looked out far longer than could be justified by our postage stamp of a garden with its single cypress and ornamental pond, a neglected, now-stagnant pool riddled with waterborne disease. Eventually he turned and said,

  ‘Do you think the fact the flowers were hand-delivered rather than sent is relevant?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Because normally it’s a lot easier just to send flowers.’